Scanning the headlines of The Washington Post can reveal a dramatic sense of who they like best. On the top of Saturday’s front page were the words “THE OBAMA EFFECT: An education in hope and change.” Reporter William Wan profiled “The kids who adopted a president,” minority children who successfully lobbied to rename their grade school after Barack Obama.
“To the nation, Obama’s election was a historic and cultural milestone, an electrifying moment when the seemingly impossible became real,” Wan wrote, but now the intensity has faded to a “more nuanced reality.” The reality is that “the nation” did not uniformly find Obama’s election “electrifying,” as the 2010 midterms aptly demonstrated.
Contrast the front page to the front page of the Style section on Saturday, where under a picture of St. Peter’s Square in Rome were the capital letters: “NOT EVEN THE VATICAN IS IMMUNE IN THE AGE OF SECRET-SPILLING INSIDE SOURCES.” Above the photo was this quote in italics from Reuters reporter Philip Pullella: “There are more documents to be leaked...We’re in the land of Machiavelli.”
Reporters Michelle Boorstein and Paul Farhi summed up: “Even in a place accustomed to leaks, this week produced a torrent....For an institution accustomed to some standard of deference, one thing is becoming clear: The Catholic Church is in a new era.”
The Washington Post: where Obama gets much more adoring press than the Pope.
